President Barack Obama said in his speech in Kansas on Tuesday, “The truth is we’ll never be able to compete with other countries when it comes to who’s best at letting their businesses pay the lowest wages…That’s a race to the bottom that we can’t win, and we shouldn’t want to win that race.” This could only be accomplished by assuring Americans are the world’s “highest-skilled, highest-educated workers.”

What does that mean for Obama’s immigration policy?

It is no secret America’s borders are insecure. The vast majority of illegal aliens come seeking work as migrant laborers and farm hands, jobs that require more brawn than brain. By all measures, they are less likely to have a college, or even a high school, education, than native born Americans. Harvard economist George Borjas has spent his career proving the role massive immigration plays in lowering the wages of all Americans, in the process pricing Americans with the most tenuous grasp on the workforce out of the market. These tend to be younger Americans and native-born minorities.

Theodore Roosevelt, whom Obama’s speech was intended to invoke, had a solution for this dilemma that bears repeating today: “It is urgently necessary to check and regulate our immigration, by much more drastic laws than now exist; and this should be done both to keep out laborers who tend to depress the labor market, and to keep out…not only criminals, idiots, and paupers, but anarchists.”

Roosevelt had much different idea of how immigrants should acculturate themselves to their new country than our current president. Barack Obama has labored mightily to assist “language minorities,” non-English speakers who are overwhelmingly illegal immigrants. TR said….